Understood as a representation in the medium of human language, the
Quran exists in its full and eternal plenitude only at the level of the Tablet,
also called the‘mother of the Book’and kept by God (Q13:38).^28 Fixity
resides in this original heavenly inscription of the Book, but reception–
even that of its translation into words to communicate with humanity–
can never function without being pierced by individual perception.
The unique receptive internalization of the Quran reflects the unpar-
alleled ontology of its author. Where Foucault offers the notion of an
author as a categorical function, here neither author nor text exceeds the
other. Far from the‘dead’author proposed by Roland Barthes, this author
is omnipresent.^29 The text is also co-eternal with creation, and thus with
the world itself. The absence and presence of the author are one. In Ash’ari
Sunni dogma, divine thought and speech are indistinguishable; the Quran
is thus simply speech and coextensive with God. Aesthetically, it has style,
but without an author to whom intentionality can be attributed. As the
standard of stylistics that cannot itself be subject to worldly measure, the
quality of style depends on reception rather than on production.
The paradox of the authorless text that is simultaneously a copy and
coextensive with its original can be considered by analogy with the para-
doxes surrounding the photograph as theorized by Barthes. He points out
that, unlike a sign distinguishing signifier and signified, the photograph
announces itself through its medium as a complete surface that records
absolute presence mechanically.^30 On this surface, we can seek that which
can be organized iconographically, which gives signs of certain factual
representations, a level of analysis that Barthes associates with what he
names thestudium. If we use the photograph as a metaphor for the way in
which the Quran conveys its message as aflat surface, thisstudiumwould
correspond with the definite (muhakhama) passages. Similarly, as the
German–Jewish-born theologian Mohammed Asad (1900–1992) explains,
“the philologists and jurists describe asnass– namely, ordinances or
statements which are self-evident (zahir) by virtue of their wording.”^31
One might think of the apparently redundant and at times contradictory
messages of the Quran that nonetheless simultaneously maintain meaning
as producing a surface of multiple exposures which still retain theflatness
and absolute indexicality of the photograph. Just as a multi-exposure
photograph simultaneously shows and blurs its subject, this simultaneity(^28) Abdel-Haleem, 2004 : 154. (^29) Gallop, 2011. (^30) Barthes, 1981 :40–45.
(^31) Asad, 1980 : 66.
112 Seeing with the Heart